Arts @ Delicious · Past Exhibition No. 4
The Medium of Memory
Kenneth Gatewood
August 8 – October 18, 2026 · Delicious at The Dunbar, 4229 S. Central Ave, Los Angeles
The fourth Arts @ Delicious exhibition, and the first solo watercolor show La Mancha has hung at The Dunbar. It followed Women of Central Avenue: Keepers of the Flame, a nine-artist show about who carries this avenue’s memory forward. This one asked what that memory is made of.
Kenneth Gatewood has painted out of South Central Los Angeles for decades and taught in LAUSD classrooms. Watercolor is the least forgiving medium there is. The paper takes the pigment and the decision is final, with nothing underneath to hide a correction. That made it the right medium for a show about what a neighborhood keeps.
The show was hung as a jazz suite in three movements, a structure borrowed from Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige. It was planned to close September 30 and ran into October.
Three Movements
The Dunbar, painted for this exhibition
Movement I
The Music
Portraits of the musicians whose work came out of this stretch of Central Avenue and the circuit around it: Muddy Waters, Otis Redding, and Stevie Wonder in Superstitious. Gatewood works the faces tight and lets everything below them run down the sheet in drips he chose to keep.
He also painted a new piece for the show. The Dunbar stacks Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole under the hotel’s red vertical marquee, with a Central Avenue street sign reading 4200 S. That’s the block the painting was made for. The hotel opened in 1928 because Black travelers had almost nowhere else in Los Angeles to stay, and the musicians who played the clubs on this avenue slept and rehearsed here.
The Awakening, Purdy Gurl 2, Vision Unlimited
Movement II
The Children
Three girls, no names on the labels. Where Movement I leans on faces everyone knows, these pieces have to hold you on their own. Gatewood gives two of them gold. In The Awakening it’s a full disc of 22 karat leaf behind the girl’s head, and in Vision Unlimited a crescent. That’s the halo of Byzantine and Sienese altarpieces, pointed at somebody’s daughter.
Unlike a saint in an altarpiece, these girls speak. Each gold piece carries a handwritten first-person line. Vision Unlimited also sets the child beside a 1954 JET cover of an eighteen-year-old Diahann Carroll, photographed before anyone knew who she would become.
Movement III
The Legacy
The civil rights and endurance work. These pieces are about struggle that hasn’t ended. In this movement the transparency of watercolor reads close to testimony. Every correction would show, so there aren’t any, and what’s on the sheet is the whole account.
Works Hung
| Work | Movement | Medium | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Superstitious (Stevie Wonder) | I | Watercolor, mixed media | 14 × 14 in |
| Muddy Waters | I | Watercolor, mixed media | 16 × 20 in |
| Otis Redding | I | Watercolor, mixed media | 12 × 22 in |
| Purdy Gurl 2, 2023 | II | Original watercolor | 15 × 22 in framed |
| The Awakening | II | Mixed media watercolor with 22k gold leaf, limited edition giclée, 3 of 10 | 12 × 22 in framed |
| Vision Unlimited, 2026 | II | Limited edition giclée, printer’s proof 1 of 2, with JET magazine collage | 10 × 12 in framed |
At the Arts Pavilion
On September 19, Gatewood was the Featured Artist at the Arts Pavilion during the 31st Annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival, curated by La Mancha Gallery. The pavilion sits a few blocks from The Dunbar. Festival-goers could meet the work under the tent on Saturday and see the full show at the hotel through the rest of the run.
Read the Essays
- The Medium of MemoryThe launch essay: what carries over from Keepers of the Flame
- Movement I: The MusicOn The Dunbar and why the music came first
- Movement II: The ChildrenThe gold goes to girls nobody can name
- Who Slept at the DunbarThe musicians who filled these rooms
Now on the walls
Second Life on Central · Skira Martinez
- Where
- Arts @ Delicious at The Dunbar, 4229 S. Central Ave, Los Angeles
- Runs
- October 2026 through January 30, 2027
- Sunday Jazz
- Every Sunday, 2:30–4:30 PM (presented by Mowatt Entertainment)
- Note
- The restaurant is closed Tuesdays
Presented by La Mancha Gallery, curating exhibitions in non-traditional venues on Central Avenue since 2006. Essays first published on The Cultural Thread.